Francesco Rotondo

The Evidence of Links between Landscape and Economy in a Rural Park

This paper verifies the existence of relationships between specific features of the agrarian landscape of ancient olive trees in the park territory of six municipalities in the Region of Puglia, Italy, and the economic activity of the areas concerned. This has the scope of exploring developmental opportunities, whether already put into place, or potentially active. It develops and verifies theoretical approaches and empirical experiences which propose processes of territorial exploitation and local development as pathways for the identification and utilization of both the differences and distinctive characteristics of the territory itself, toward the creation of a “value added territory†as the basis for development. Agriculture tends to be presented in terms of the “care and culture†of the territory: not only the appropriate production of primary goods, ecological and locally characterized but also the contextualized production of land and environment. In this paper, the authors use the concept of the park from the perspective of innovation: no longer referring to the concept of environmental protection and preservation as a defensive action, but creating a synthesis between the productive enhancement of open spaces alongside the upgrading of environmental systems, the built environment and environmental, and cultural development.

Identification of “Hot Spots” of Social and Housing Difficulty in Urban Areas: Scan Statistics for Housing Market and Urban Planning Policies

The objective of the present work is to use statistical data to identify territorial zones characterized by the presence of urban poverty related to property ownership and the availability of residential services. Poverty clusters have a high concentration of poor people, but that does not mean that everyone living in them is poor. While poverty is widely accepted to be an inherently multi-dimensional concept, it has proved very difficult to develop measures that both capture this multidimensionality and make comparisons over time and space easy. With this in mind, we attempt to apply a Total Fuzzy and Relative (TFR) approach, based on a fuzzy measure of the degree of association of an individual to the totality of the poor and an approach of semantic distance (Munda 1995), based on the definition of a “fuzzy distance” as a discriminating multidimensional reference to rank the availability to property in real estate market, as complement of urban poverty, in the specific case of the City of Bari. These approaches have been improved using the SaTScan methodology, a circle-based spatial-scan statistical method (Kulldorff 1997; Patil and Taille 2004; Aldstat and Getis 2006). It concerns geoinformatic surveillance for poverty hot-spot detection, used as a scientific base to lead urban regeneration policies.

VGI to Enhance Minor Historic Centres and Their Territorial Cultural Heritage

The advent of Web 2.0 and the development of information and communication technologies represent an opportunity to reduce the spatial distances and enhance fast access to any type of information.

ICT to evaluate participation in urban planning: remarks from a case study

The paper study the ICT available to evaluate participation in urban planning, starting from a relevant experience made in Italy inside a funding programme of the Italian Ministry for Innovation and Technology. It starts describing the state of the art of methods and techniques to evaluate participation in urban planning and the informatics tools available to support these participation processes, before the arrival on the scene of the social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. In the following paragraph the paper describes the case study: a participation process in the South of Italy, made to design the master plan of a medium sized city. In the following paragraph ICT used in the case of study are discussed and revised. In the last paragraph conclusions are made on this relevant subject for urban planning and design offering some general reflections.

Ontologies for urban regeneration could be useful for managing cohesion policies

This paper describes the building of an urban regeneration ontology for managing cohesion policies focused on revitalizing cities. After a discussion of the background of the ontology subject, and about the experience in which the prototype of an ontology for urban regeneration has been developed, first user needs and requirements for ontology specification are described starting from this prototype. The prototype has been developed in the “Towntology software”, by the LIRIS Laboratory at the University of Lyon (France). It has been tested in the Italian Apulia Region offices for Spatial planning and Environmental Management; as described in the paragraph “OUR first training”. The test has shown interesting address and suggestions for user needs and requirements that are discussed in the paragraph “OUR suggestions”. The reported experience is not over, hence not all what can be said has been written or observed, but these first results are useful to trace possible future perspectives for research.

Cultural Territorial Systems

The main objective of this chapter is to introduce the book as a first result of ongoing research about cultural heritage and landscape as a key for a sustainable local development. A place-based approach is useful to promote cultural territorial systems as the necessary interpretative format to understand the contemporary urban and territorial structure, which is often polarized between metropolitan areas and small and mid-sized towns.

Internal Areas Strategies: From Statistical Methods to Planning Policies

The “National Strategy for Internal Areas”, made by the Italian Government for the European Union Partnership Agreement 2014-2020, defines the territory of the Italian internal areas as a set of project-areas, local inter-municipal systems each with its own territorial identity defined by social, economic, geographic, demographic and environmental characteristics. In this sense, we can define “internal” those areas significantly distant from the centers of supply of essential services (education, health, and mobility), rich in environmental and cultural resources with highly diversified natural aspects. The objective of the work is to re-elaborate the existing mapping for the identification of the internal areas, made by the Italian Government, especially taking into account the demographic, economic, morphological profiles and essential services supply, through the use of fuzzy logic. Then, trying to deep explain possible planning strategies and policies for these relevant, sometimes abandoned and extremely diffuse territories.

Territorial Statistical Analysis of National Student Mobility in Italian Universities

The reforms in the university education system, motivated primarily by the need to bring universities closer to the professional needs of the economy and businesses, have changed the offer of Italian university education. The present work starts from a synthetic representation of national student mobility, both in terms of the allocation of university students in the various universities and the attractiveness of the various territorial areas. The comparison between the “potential” and “effective” catchment area and the structural availability, allows to define territories more attractive than others. By defining thematic maps, useful for summarizing national mobility, we will try to make a summary of the Italian situation trying to bring out the main causes of this phenomenon.

Web Potential to Promote Equity Planning Practices

The concept of Urban Services, like the product between supply and demand in a city, dominates, although in an indirect way, urban planning. Nowadays we need to organize planning processes based on a study of actual needs, from which come down services to promote in urban center. It’s like a “matriosca” scheme: the first part, the bigger, is the city, and then we have a lot of subsystems connected together, who are Government, citizens, needs and services. This process comes down from the city’s change, that before the Modern Era was just a geographical place, where the walls were the limits. Today the city is the union between the geographical place and citizens, where social and urban polices are the basis for the economic, social and environmental growth. In the case study, concerning an urban regeneration plan in the city of Bari in Southern Italy, these aspects have been analyzed and practiced. It shows the integration between public participation and use of ICT, for its promotion.

Multidimensional Approaches to Evaluate Urban Planning Scenarios

The evaluation of urban planning practices may be thought as a way to represent and communicate a project or a plan as an object open to judgment as well as an opportunity for capacity building. An urban plan is therefore defined as neither right nor wrong due merely to the results it may generate but, above all, to the capacities that it is able of constructing and implementing in settled, involved communities. In this paper, this approach guides the analysis of a Plan for the community services of a medium sized city in the south of Italy, driven by some urban planning scenarios evaluated by a multicriteria assessment. The paper is introduced by the description of the objectives of the work, followed by an account of the methodological aspects founding the study. In the third section the case study is described in its principal aspects and finally some conclusions are made in the last section highlighting first results and future research development.